Home Profiles Exclusively for Doorvestors
New deposit dashboard. New home matching algorithm. What’s next? A brand spanking new Home Profile for Doorvestors!
It’s been almost 18 months since we’ve revisited the look of home profiles. But with all the new changes happening this year, we knew it’s time to rethink and reshape how you, our Doorvestors, see homes. Enter, the Doorvest Home Profile 2.0.
This article will discuss the fully redesigned Doorvest Home Profile, its new functionalities, and how we integrated all of your lovely feedback into its design.
Before we continue, we wanted to give many thanks for the gracious feedback provided by many of you. This includes feature requests, bug fixes, and overall process suggestions.
New Functionality
You can read more about the design and ideation process below, but first, let’s cover what functionality has been changed!
Financials Top & Center
We interviewed many customers, investors, and even employees of Doorvest (aka the ‘Vesties’). And you all told us — the “Financial” section is the most important. It’s the first thing you think about when seeing a home and also the juiciest part. Who doesn’t love amazing appreciation, high cap rates, and great cash-on-cash?
So now, we’ve moved the Financial section to the top so you can get right into the action.
We also reimagined what an investment property means. If you’re a Doorvestor, you’re a long-term investor. And that means we had to think LONG — maybe even for the entire life-of-a-mortgage-long.
The Financial section has been upgraded to display Year 1, 5, 10, and 30. It’ll also include rent increase over time, along with appropriate expense increase. So now, you’ll get a realistic idea of what it’ll be like owning a rental home for the long term.
Investment Calculator Highlights
We made a couple of improvements to the Investment Calculator.
First, we’ve added the “Edit” button. This allows you to edit the underlying assumptions we use in the Home Profile so that you can better see realistic numbers based on your plan. That might mean a higher interest rate or a lower insurance rate.
Second, we included the 4 most important numbers:
Appreciation
Cash-on-Cash Return
Monthly Rent
Cap Rate
This way, it’s always visible right when you need it.
P.S. We’ve always defaulted to a “conservative” 3% return based on the national average. But don’t forget we also pull in 20 years of market data from HouseCanary to build out the “Historical” appreciation too.
Home Price Comps
If you paid close attention, we’ve always included Home Price Comps (aka “Comps” of the previous Home Profile sent to our Doorvestors). But not everyone always noticed. So, what to do about that? It’s now at the top of the page for you to download and view.
For those still learning, “Comps” are a comparative analysis of the home’s purchase price against recent sales of homes similar to the home you are looking at. And with each Home Profile, you can grab your report to make you feel more confident that you’re getting a deal on your investment home.
‘Like’ and ‘Dislike’ Homes
We saw you all LOVED our Home Feedback feature on the Deposits page. And we just knew we had to bring it to the Home Profile too. So now, you can directly like and dislike homes AND provide valuable feedback for us to tailor the experience to you directly from the Home Profile.
A Fresh New UI
And the rest of the Home Profile? Well, it got an entirely new interface to match our new Deposits page interface. You’ll be able to clearly view the Doorvest Neighborhood Score, school ratings (courtesy of GreatSchools), and a breakdown and detail of the entire renovation and home condition.
As your home goes through the Doorvest Journey alongside you, you’ll get updates from third-party inspection reports, post-renovation details, and more.
Experience Doorvest Home Profiles today!
Get started by sharing your investment goal and submitting a fully refundable deposit, and expect to see these Doorvest homes hit your inbox and Client Portal.
The Product, Design, and Engineering Process
Our design process always starts with: “what problem(s) are we trying to solve?” And that’s where your feedback comes in. Asking for feature requests, providing feedback for our team, and giving suggestions for improvements are foundational components of our design process. We review everything provided by you, our Doorvestors, and our internal team members!
For the Doorvest Home Profile 2.0, the problem was quad-fold.
We wanted to solve the organization of information for customers to bring the most relevant (and desired) information front and center.
We wanted to highlight the multi-decade effect of your Doorvestment.
We wanted to bring the Home Profile into the modern era of our design language.
We wanted to optimize the backend of the Home Profile so that it would load faster, be easier to implement new features in the future, and remove everything unnecessary. Tech debt happens when you’re moving quick…
For this redesign, we kicked off our internal project of UX and UI Research spearheaded by our principal UI/UX designer, Lennox. He held numerous interviews with many of our Doorvestors, conducted a multitude of surveys, and spoke internally to find out exactly how we wanted to present and bring the Home Profile 2.0 to life. Safe to say, we hit the nail on the head on this one. Data and research are now a gold standard we’re fostering for all changes.
Then, our amazing engineers, Diva and Michelle, got to work to bring this together in record time. “Tech debt happens when you’re moving quickly”. This meant refactoring the code across the board to optimize it with the new design. Not only that, they ensured not a single feature was left behind.
And what we’re left with — a brand new Doorvest Home Profile experience for all of you, our lovely Doorvestors!
In short…
We know that the new and improved Doorvest Home Profile will improve the customer experience, especially from revamped Financials, a fresh new UI, and brand new functionality.
As we close this out with one of the Doorvest core values: The Door Is Always Open, we want to reaffirm our value for constructive feedback, suggestions, and bug reports. You can certainly expect to see them implemented in the near future. To request any new feature, click here, or email our Product Manager, Justin, directly here.
Access your very own Doorvest Portal and view exclusive Home Profiles today!
Get started by sharing your investment goal and submitting a fully refundable deposit, and expect to see these Doorvest homes hit your inbox and Client Portal.